Sreedhari Desai, a PON Graduate Research Fellow for the 2009-2010 academic year, was recently featured in an Op-Ed in the Boston Globe. Desai’s research examines the ways in which childhood cues can make businesses more charitable and individuals more honest. The full text of the article can be found here.

About Sreedhari Desai:
Sreedhari Desai is an Assistant Professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (Kenan Flagler Business School). ﻿ She is also a research fellow at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics (Harvard University) and at the Women and Public Policy program (Harvard Kennedy School). She obtained her Ph.D. in Organizational Behavior at the David Eccles School of Business in the University of Utah.

Sreedhari’s research investigates how individuals behave in organizations, with a focus on ethical decision making and fairness. Her dissertation, entitled, “Warding off organizational vampires: Moral cues and social norms as a necklace of garlic,” examines the possibility of offering employees a safe way in which they may prevent their superiors from asking them to perform unethical acts. Specifically, she investigates whether employees may dissuade their superiors from issuing unethical directives by exposing them to cues related to ethics. If displaying cues such as moral quotations at the bottom of emails, pictures of ethical leaders in one’s cubicle, or religious accessories on one’s person can trigger implicit psychological processes in superiors’ minds such that without realizing it, they feel discouraged from asking their subordinates to engage in unethical acts, then the latter may have a way of saying “no” without fearing subsequent retaliation. Sreedhari holds an M.S. in Finance from the University of Utah and a B.S. in Metallurgical engineering from the Punjab Engineering College.

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Preparing for Negotiation

Understanding how to arrange the meeting space is a key aspect of preparing for negotiation. In this video, Professor Guhan Subramanian discusses a real world example of how seating arrangements can influence a negotiator’s success. This discussion was held at the 3 day executive education workshop for senior executives at the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School.

Guhan Subramanian is the Professor of Law and Business at the Harvard Law School and Professor of Business Law at the Harvard Business School.